In the end, Connecticut and Illinois danced familiar steps on Tuesday night.
The Huskies led as they usually do, pressing on defense and converting the results into quick points. The Fighting Illini couldn’t follow along, and they reverted to the sloppy offensive plays that don’t beat national powers.
Eighth-ranked Connecticut (6-0) eventually ran to a 71-56 victory over Illinois (8-3) before 16,294 fans at the Civic Center.
It was the second straight loss for Illinois, which previously had beaten up on weaklings. The Illini have yet to beat a quality foe, and they continue to look for a distinctive scheme.
Illinois arrived as the underdog, and brought a game plan to match. The Illini opened this game extremely patient on offense, hoping to find good shots and keep possession.
It appeared to work, at first. Illinois threaded the ball inside to forward Chris Gandy and center Shelly Clark, who combined for 21 first-half points.
The Illini scored 22 of their 32 first-half points in the paint, largely by solving Connecticut’s uncharacteristic zone defense.
Connecticut, in contrast, seemed somewhat unfocused during the opening period. The Huskies led by two at the break, but failed to establish any sort of dominance.
“We can’t shoot with Connecticut,” said Illinois coach Lou Henson. “We’ve got to move the ball and get good shots. And we did that in the first half and then we reverted to what we’ve done much of the time.
“I thought we played very well until the second half, about as well as we can play, and then we let them get some easy ones.”
The teams traded second-half runs, with Connecticut edging ahead by nine and Illinois coming back to within one. But then, with 12 minutes remaining and the Huskies ahead 48-47, the game changed.
Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun said that he switched from a zone defense to a more familiar pressure defense. That sparked the Huskies, who quickly opened a 12-point lead and never looked back.
“I was concerned mainly that we had to get the game accellerated defensively so we could get running offensively. It wasn’t fast enough for us,” said Calhoun, whose team came in averaging 90 points per game.
Still, Connecticut did score 20 points off 18 Illinois turnovers. The Huskies also hit from outside, making 9 of 20 three-point attempts.
Henson said that Illinois set up for the Connecticut press properly, but failed to execute passes upcourt.
One particular spurt illustrates the story of this game. Midway through the second half, Connecticut guard Doron Sheffer drove for three layups within 29 seconds-helped by full-court pressure and turnovers.
“You just enjoy those moments,” said Sheffer, an Israeli native. “I felt that was the breaking point.”
For good measure, Sheffer sealed the game with a pair of three-pointers. He led Connecticut with 17 points, all of them in the second half.
Guard Brian Fair added 16 points, including three of Connecticut’s three-pointers.
Clark led Illinois with 18 points, followed by Gandy’s 13.
Overall, however, Illinois made just 39.3 percent from the field, including 31.3 percent during a second half marked by poor shot selection. The Illini guards, Kiwane Garris and Richard Keene, were just 5 of 22, continuing a season-long slump.
But after the game, Illinois players blamed two other troubling problems that could be more dangerous than poor shooting. Clark said that the Huskie crowd made things difficult, and Gandy said that the Illini got out-hustled for a second straight time.
“I don’t think it was just them pressing,” Clark said. “They had the crowd. . . We had to rely on timeouts and signals to get it done and we ran out of timeouts and the signals just weren’t getting it done.”
Said Gandy: “They wanted it a lot more than we did tonight. We were missing something there.”
The strain was evident, although Connecticut players mistook it for fatigue.
“Kids kept saying, `They’re getting tired, they’re getting tired,’ ” Calhoun said of his players during second-half huddles. “So we just pressed more.”
